HIV/AIDS News

Youth who were infected with HIV perinatally who do not strictly adhere to ART as adolescents and young adults were at higher risk of viremia, immunosuppression, CDC-B and CDC-C events and mortality, according to a recent study.

SAN DIEGO – Thanks to the extraordinarily effective therapies and approaches to prevention currently available, turning around the trajectory of HIV/AIDS global pandemic is possible, according to Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

In 2014, more than 1 in 5 new HIV diagnoses in the United States were among young people aged 13-24 years, according to the CDC. However, even with the disproportionate number of new HIV infections occurring among youth, only 10% of sexually-experienced high school students report having ever been tested for HIV.

For black teenagers, who account for 63% of new adolescent HIV cases in the United States, education on proper coping mechanisms targeting depression, emotion regulation and sexual risk behaviors may reduce their risk for sexually transmitted infections.

Although perinatal HIV infections among infants born in the United States have significantly declined since 2002, occurrence remains 1.75 times greater than the goal set in place by the CDC to eliminate mother-to-child transmission, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics.

SAN DIEGO — While addressing the ACP membership during the Internal Medicine Meeting’s opening ceremony, Anthony S. Fauci, MD, MACP, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, discussed the importance of treating and preventing emerging and reemerging infectious diseases.

One hundred HIV/AIDS organizations signed a letter to Congress today strongly urging members to oppose passing the American Health Care Act, or AHCA, because an estimated 24 million Americans would likely lose health insurance coverage, including thousands of patients with HIV, if it is enacted.

Tuberculosis and malaria are diseases that have existed in the human population for thousands of years. Although effective treatments for both conditions are now available, new cases of these diseases continue to be seen each year.

In the earliest days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, HIV was characterized as “the gay man’s disease,” a misrepresentation that resulted in the exclusion of thousands of women from HIV/AIDS clinical trials and an increase in mortality among women who contracted the virus. Unfortunately, the reverberations of this misunderstanding persist today, in the sense that many women — as well as many clinicians — may not be aware that women represent approximately 50% of the 37 million people living with HIV worldwide.